The courier. (Lincoln, Neb.) 1894-1903, July 07, 1900, Page 2, Image 2
THE COURIER. X France. Men are to her but checkers and when a few thousand are killed it Is as though she swept her hand over a huge checker board crowded with tiny pieces wasting to be moved this way or that as the players please. Tsi An is not a pood woman but she is a good plajer, the best in Asia and much the best in Europe for she is beating while heavily handicapped. "What could William the loquacious do, he of the operatic mustachios such as bass warriors wear, if he were InTsiAu's place, a member of a de spised and butchered sex, and heir of no hereditary rights? He might strut and prate of the divine right of em presses all the time end the Tsung li Yamen and all the other cabinets of the Chinese department of state would pay no attention to the woman thing who persisted in talking. This tiny woman of China with the doll face, and the abstracts Iook has made Chinaman, Englishmen, Americans, Germans, and Russians nervous. Hid den in the recesses of the sacred city, tins little woman is teasing the world and not a wrinkle has yet marred the serenity of her inscrutable old ori ental face. She is as placid ordering the execution of a squad of men as she Is when she orders her breakfast, brought to her by a cringing, creak ing slave who wriggles in and out of the Empress' presence on his stomach. India Famine Fund. A movement to aid the 10,000,000 in India who are starving to death has been started In various parts of this country. In Lincoln Doctor Manss, of the First Congregational church, has assumed the charge of such con tributions. Were our own people starving In any part of this country aid would be sent immediately. The distance should not decrease our benefactions. There is grain enough stored in In dia to feed" "every person and every animal in the affected district,but the people, through the failure of crops, have not the means to buy it. It is popular to lay the famine at the door of England and over taxation but In dia starved whenever the monsoon rains failed long before the English occupation. The famine destroys more people because there are more people to destroy. English sanitation and the sanitary police have cleaned the houses and the alleys and lowered the death rate so that when the crops fail there are many more mouths to feed than in the old days when only the strongest lived. Funds received can be telegraphed to the proper agency so that the starving in India may be immediately relieved. dub Ethics. The Royal Yacht Squadron recently held an election and blackballed a number of applicants for admission to the squadron of which the Prince of Wales is commodore. In conse quence the Prince called an extra meeting to alter the rules so that the next election would be by a club com mittee and not by the whole member ship. Butjhe smart set of England is not subservient and the club not only voted against the Princa's prop osition but made the conditions of election more stringent than ever by decreeing that one blackball In five shall exclude instead of one in csn. Club ethics is a special and very technical department of the science. A set of people have agreed to gether to pay a certain amount for the accomplishment of an end or a purpose only attainableby association. They have a right to protect them selves by strict rules govering the ad mission of new members. The object of most social clubs is to have a good time. Happiness is impossible in the enforced society of obnoxious people. The Prince's nominees were his friends and he desired to please them and himself Dy" securing their admis sion to the most exclusive club in England. Some of the men he pro posed were obnoxious to old members of the club. Their admission meant a lowering of the tone of the club and Englishmen are not to be bullied into releasing their right to congenial company even by royalty itself. So the Prince was snubbed and the prin ciple was once more insisted upon that the old members of a club have a right, by the use of the blackball, to keep the membership of a club the same in quality as when it was found ed. The principle in question is even worth sacrificing the Prince of Wales' friends and hurting his feelings to establish. A club is founded by cer tain people, not for business but for pleasure. Theologians have decided that Hades is not so much a place of flame and burning, as it is a club of very disagreeable people, bad man nered, bad tempered souls forcibly restrained to each others' society. If obnoxious members are allowed in a club against the protest by blackball of a minority equal to one in ten of the membership, of course the pleas ure for which they subscribed and paid their fees, is destroyed and royal ty cannot change this syllogism. The St. Louis Strike. After fifty-six days duration, the St. Louis strike has been declared off. Representatives of the company and the executive committee of the strik ers signed an agreement, which, for the present settles the trouble. The Agreement: 1. The provisions of the agreement of March 10th, 1900, as to rates of pay and hours of service will be continued in force by the company. 2. Every employe of the company to be free to join or not to join any organization, and no discrimination to be made for or against him be cause of the manner in which he ex ercises his freedom. 3. Any attempt on the part of any employe to induce another employe by intimidation or threats to join or uotto join any union shall be cause of the immediate discharge of the person guilty of such attempt. 4. Any attempt to influence any employe by an official of the company to join or not to join any union shall be cause of the discharge of such of ficial. 5. The company will meet any em ployes or committee of employes, whether representing themselves, oth er employes or an association of em ployes, regarding any matter of mu tual interest. 6. For the purpose of tilling vacan cies which may now exist or hereafter arise, the committee of former em ployes, of which T. B. Edwards is chairman, shall prepare a list of the men who were in the company's ser vice May 7th last, and as the company now or hereafter needs additional men it will select them exclusively from this list until it is exhausted, not in terfering, however, with men now in the service. No person shall be eligi ble to this list who has been guilty of any acts of lawlessness or violence. St. Louis Transit Company. By Edward S. Whittaker, President. T. B. EDWARDS, Chairman of Committee. The strike is hereby declared off. T. B.Edwards, Chairman Committee. Section 3 recognizes the rights of the employer to hire labor not be longing to any union and grants some assurance of immunity from attack to non-union labor. The last part of section 6 releases the street railway company from the obligation of hir ing men who have destroyed railroad property, attacked the men whom the company employed to fill vacancies caused by the strike, or who attacked women and other passengers who rode on the cars the strikers do not claim to own. The agreement is remark able for these two clauses which ad mits over the signature of strike rep resentatives that the employer has rights.' The other four paragraphs relate, of course, to tha privileges of the striking employes. The two clauses, referred to, were insisted upon by the company. No union man in his senses and without coercion has before admitted that an employe of labor has any right to object to the coercion of some of his employes (non union men) by their fellow labor ers to join the union. So far as I know there has been no such privilege granted to employers of labor in re cent years. It marks an extension of the rights of man to a class whom an entirely sentimental and one-sided consideration of the labor subject has excluded from consideration. The St. Louis strikers, were at first, as in the beginning of every strike, the recipients of sympathy from those who, always sympathize with strik ers, right or wrong. When the brutes attacked women they lost even this ignorant, unreasoning sympathy. Many lives have been lost and mil lions of dollars worth of trade divert ed from St. Louis as well as the prop erty that was actually destroyed to attain this agreement which the com pany would doubtless have signed in the first place, if the walking dele gate had not ordered the men out be fore attempting a reconciliation. Walking delegates are responsible for many lives lost. They are so anxious to earn their salary and to be the cen tral cynosure of excitement. Youthful scholars full of sincere zeal and love for their kind are apt to think thelaborer is always right,and the com pany or employer always wrong. They do not discriminate until they come into personal conflict with an organi zation every member of which Is pledg ed not to work, whatever the emer gency, but a certain number of hours, and not to produce more in those hours than the average stint designated by the union. When the young student of economics by unmeasured and un stinted energy becomes the owner of a business and tries to hire men to do the labor he has so hopefully and confidently performed him self, and is met with remonstrances that the work he has done himself is too much for one man and that his principles and the rules of the union will not allow him to undertake it, his ideas of the hardships of the labor er and the unjust demands of capitol are reversed. Youngsters' Patriotism. The week has been devoted to the small boy who began setting off fire crackers on Monday and the last of the week finds him still using up crackers asfizzers which refused to full HI their desti ny and explode as crackers.Smoke, explosions and yells the small boy has enjoyed, not to his heart's content, for firecrackers burn up quickly and the explosion is only a delicious sec ond, and a conflagration but teazes him by its brevity. But the fathers who have burned their money and the mothers and sisters whose nerves have been wilted watch with irre pressilbe relief thef small boy poking about in the grass looking for unex ploded firecrackers, rocket sticks and Roman candle cylinders. The in qusition of Fourth of July week is fixed by custom and it is idle to pro test. But the small boy turned loose on a community armed with explos ives and seizing the liberty of yelling is a trial. It is a mysterious change from the tastes of youth to those of non-explosive middle age. In the former period, laughter, anger, en thusiasm explodes to the touch of any dying flame, It is harder to set the old fellows off. The present way of celebrating the Fourth will last as long as the ears of youth are delight ed with the unexpected roar of an explosion that breaks up the air from here to China into warring atoms.lt is as impossible for youth to comprehend why age does not like it as it is for age to understand the pleasure of youth in the unnatural report, And youth is king. Vive le Roi Our School System. Mr. Marion Hill has made some very interesting experiments on school children and their apprehen sion of patriotic songs and themes. The experiments are recorded in the current McClure's, which bears olf the palm of the month from all the maga zines. A monthly reading of maga zines for a number of years has a curious effect. Unless the reader has an insatiable love for tliB printed word, the time comes when, no mat ter how gorgeous the cover is and how clever and fascinating are the illus trations, the sophisticated reader is sure, before he cuts the leaves that he will find nothing new. He keeps on from month to month cutting maga zine pages because he occasionally comes across something drawn from life, like this "Star Spanglec' Banner" of Mr. Hill's. Some grown up people at a dinner party, Mr. Hill says tried to repeat the "Star Spangled Banner," and failed. "Amidst the comments arous ed by this not unprecedented inci dent, the host's ten-year old daughter volunteered to help the big folks out and did so by correctly reciting all the verses." She said she had been taught the verses at school and after wards wrote them out for the com pany, And this is what she wrote: AMERICA My country, tissuf the Sweet land of libaet tea, Oi thee I sing. Land where my father died, Land where the Pilgrims pried, From evry mountain side, Let fridmen ring. My native country the Land of the noble free, Thy name I love. I love toy rots and chills, Thy woods and temper pills, My heart with latcher thrills Like that above. Children of ten years and there abouts learn more readily by ear than by eye; and this little girl's version of the Banner is a reproduction of what she thought she heard. Her expla nation of the meaning of the stanza shows that she bad thought of the meaning of the words, translated sonfe and hopelessly given up others. Children listen intently at times, and their rendition of grown up peoples' speeches has at all times the merit of originality. We are too complacent about our school system. It has not progressed rapidly in the last one hundred years. It has changed, and tUe children study about twice as many subjects as parents or rather grand parents were obliged to study. It may be because the classes are so large that teachers have not the opportunity of finding out how obscurely and dimly the pu pils know what has been taught them. Public schools are commendable and hopeful institutions because they are public and because every child has an equal chance and is on the same plane with the rich and the poor. But it is questionable if the public school teaches the child to think, to concen- - V. 2l" V K : .